WFB doesn’t work for me!
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012I became disgusted with Forbes Magazine, even before blogging about their cover story on Monsanto as company of the year. Now they’ve done it again. This blog was drafted for publication today before Forbes landed in my mailbox yesterday with Wells Fargo Bank (WFB) on the cover as “The Bank that Works”. Well, they don’t work for me!
I’ve been a WFB Customer for almost two decades with a Premier Master Asset (PMA) account identifying me as a “High Value” customer. At the beginning of the housing bubble I loved WFB for financing single family rental property investments for my retirement.
But when the poop hit the fan, they treated me worse than a number. As rates came down I spent years trying to refinance my properties through them. They could not (or would not) help. They had me resubmit reams of information they already had, charged me a $500 application fee, then denied the loan, multiple times. Finally, as interest rates plummeted last year, I spent ten months working with an independent mortgage broker to refinance four properties. Imagine my shock when two weeks after closing the last one, WFB acquired two of them. PMA customer or not, WFB would not loan me money, despite a 19 year relationship with them, but had no problem acquiring my loans from a third party. Individuals are a tiny, insignificant annoyance to the business of big banking. WFB works for someone, but not for me, and likely not for you. I stuck with WFB because they were not even close to being the worst of the lot. But the problem is systemic, and I founded GoHuman to initiate radical change, so GoHuman.com is in the process of switching merchant services from WFB to Summit Credit Union. My apologies to our community for taking so long to take this step in breaking my personal co-dependence on a “too-big-to-fail” institution. This move is long overdue, but it’s now easier to say WFB PMA? KMA! Over the next few months we’ll get more serious about establishing who and what we are, and how, exactly, we are going to change the way our world works! We also look forward to hearing your thoughts.
